Project Syndicate

By  Alexander Friedman JACKSON, WYOMING – For the last 50 years, almost every US presidential election has brought a new swing of the national political pendulum.

By Xiao Qiang BERKELEY – In his 2016 book The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century, Norwegian political scientist Stein Ringen describes contemporary China as a “controlocracy,” arguing that its system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than what came before.

By  Kailash Satyarthi NEW DELHI – Every day, 152 million children perform hard labour, often in hazardous conditions.

By David Richmond LONDON – Niger’s government is sounding the alarm about bogus meningitis vaccines – and it is not the first time.

By Reda Cherif, Fuad Hasanov, and Sabine Schlorke WASHINGTON, DC – For many firms in emerging and developing economies, emulating the success of the likes of Samsung and Hyundai may seem like an impossible dream.

By Elizabeth Drew WASHINGTON, DC – The recent tense, dangerous exchanges between the United States and Iran have revealed a great deal about US President Donald Trump’s management of his foreign policy.

By Peter Singer MELBOURNE – On January 3, the United States assassinated Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, while he was leaving Baghdad International Airport in a car with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia.

By Sergei Guriev PARIS – From Hitler to Stalin, and from Mussolini to Mao, the world’s twentieth-century dictators took to heart Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous dictum that “it is better to be feared than loved.”

By Justin Yifu Lin and Yan Wang BEIJING – Since the 1960s, more than $4.6 trillion (in constant 2007 dollars) in gross bilateral and multilateral official development assistance (ODA) has been transferred to low-income countries.

By Shashi Tharoor NEW DELHI – At a time when India’s major national priority ought to be creating economic growth, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has instead plunged the country into a new political crisis of its own making.

NEW YORK – It’s clear: we are living beyond our planet’s limits.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – Wall Street hedge funds and lawyers have turned an arcane procedure of international treaties into a money machine, at the cost of the world’s poorest people.

MOSCOW – In her 2014 book Putin’s Kleptocracy, the late Karen Dawisha argued that the key to understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia is money.

By  Jorge G. Castañeda MEXICO CITY – Events in Bolivia remain exceptionally fluid following the ouster of President Evo Morales.

NEW YORK – The climate crisis and the 2008 financial crisis are two sides of the same coin.

By Kenneth Rogoff SOUTH BEND – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at least half right when he recently told the United States Congress that there is no US monopoly on regulation of next-generation payments technology.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – The worst foreign-policy decision by the United States of the last generation – and perhaps longer – was the “war of choice” that it launched in Iraq in 2003 for the stated purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction that did not, in fact, exist.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz NEW YORK – At the end of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a celebrated essay called “The End of History?”

By Simon Johnson WASHINGTON, DC – Since the end of World War II, the United States dollar has been at the heart of international finance and trade.

By Emma Navarro OSLO – The Earth’s oceans face many threats, none of which have quick fixes.